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ONE HUNDRED YEARS 
OF PEACE 

BY HENRY CABOT |j.ODGE 

UNITED STATES SENATOR FROM MASSACHUSETTS 



NEW YORK 
THE OUTLOOK COMPANY 

1912 



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Copyright, 1912, by 

The Outlook Company 

New Vork 

All rights reserved 









I 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE' 



BY HENRY CABOT LODGE 

UNITED STATES SENATOR FROM MASSACHUSETTS 



'~T~^HE last war between Great Britain and 
I the United States began in June, 1812. 
■*- Tiiere has been no war between the 
two countries since the Treaty of Ghent was 
signed on Christmas Eve in 1814. Strictly 
speaking, the absence of war constitutes peace, 
and therefore we may describe these hundred 
years just passed as a century of peace be- 
tween the United States and Great Britain. 
But in the larger and better sense of the 
word it must be confessed that the relations 
between the two countries during that period 
have been at times anything but peaceful, and 
often far from friendly. Indeed, there have 
been some perilous moments when war has 
seemed verj' imminent. To describe this 
period therefore as one of unbroken good 
will merely because there was no actual fight- 
ing would be wholly misleading. If a review, 
however brief, of the relations between Great 
Britain and the United States since 1812 is 
to possess any value, it can only be through 
showing how, by slow steps, with many in- 
terruptions and much bitterness on both sides, 
we have nevertheless finally attained to the 
genuine friendship in which all sensible men 
of both countries rejoice to-day. This fortu- 
nate condition has been reached only after 
many years of storm and stress, which it 
seems to posterity, always blessed with that 
unerring wisdom which comes after the 
event, might have been easily avoided. 

To understand the present situation aright, 
to comprehend the meaning and effects of the 
War of 1812 and of the ninet3'-eight years 
of peace which have followed its conclusion, 
it is necessary to begin with the separation of 
the two countries, by the peace of 1782, 
when the connection between England and 
the United States ceased to be that of mother 
country and colonies and became the more 
distant relation which exists between two in- 
dependent nations. Just now there appears 
to be a tendency among Englishmen to re- 
gard that separation of the eighteenth cen- 
tury as a small matter, especially so far as 
their own country is concerned, a view which, 
however comfortable, is hardly sustained by 
history, and we may well pause a moment at 
the outset to consider just what the war re- 

' Copyright, 1912, by the Outlook Company. 



suiting in the treaties of Paris meant, for on 
that decisive event rests ultimately all that has 
since come to pass. 

As an illustration of the attitude of mind 
to which I have referred, let me take the 
recent case of a well-known writer and very 
popular novelist. Some years ago Mr. H. 
G. Wells came to this country, and on his 
return to England, like many of his country- 
men, he wrote a book about the United 
States. Unlike many of his countrymen, 
however, he wrote a very pleasant and 
friendly book, enlivened by some characteris- 
tic remarks in favor of Socialism and of con- 
verting the Niagara Falls into horse-power. 
He made, however, one comment which 
struck me at the time, and which, I think, 
has been made since by others of his coun- 
trymen. This comment was in connection 
with his visit to Boston, as I remember, and 
criticised us good-naturedly for the extreme 
care with which we marked all spots con- 
nected with the Revolution, and for the ap- 
parent importance which we attached to that 
event. Mr. Wells, unlike Sir George Trevel- 
yan, the most brilliant of living English his- 
torians, seemed to think that this American 
feeling about the Revolution which resulted 
in the independence of the United States was 
provincial, if not parochial. In view of the 
sound system of British education, which has 
a great deal to say about English victories 
great and small, and is curiously reticent as to 
English defeats, it is perhaps not surprising 
that the importance attached to the incidents 
of the American Revolution in this country 
should surprise the average traveler from 
Great Britain. But, putting aside the par- 
tiality which Americans feel toward tb.e Revo- 
lution, owing to the fact that they were vic- 
torious, and the lack of interest with which 
the British regard it, because they were de- 
feated, it is perhaps not amiss to point out 
that the war for American independence 
really was an event of high importance, and 
was so considered then, as it has been ever 
since, by dispassionate persons. 

The revolt of the American Colonies in 
1776 agitated the world of that day far be- 
yond the parish limits of the United States. 
That Revolution divided parties and over 



threw Ministries in England. It involved 
France and Spain in war with Great Britain, 
and created the armed neutrality of the 
northern Powers, events which are rarely 
caused by trifling or provincial struggles. 
But the American Revolution was something 
much more even than this. It broke the 
British Empire for the first, and, sp far, for 
the only time. It took from England her 
greatest and most valuable possession. With 
the American Colonies she lost a population 
equal to about a fifth of the inhabitants of 
Great Britain at that period, as well as the 
ownership of the best part of a great continent. 
The independence of the Colonies was the 
foundation of the United States, and, whether 
one approves of the United States or not, 
there can be no question, I think, that they 
constitute to-day a large and important fact 
in the existing world. It was an Englishman, 
I believe, who said that, after all, England's 
most considerable achievement was the 
United States. Finally, and this is some- 
thing which I feel it would hardly be possi- 
ble to describe as parochial, modern democ- 
racy began with the American Revolution. 
When Emerson, with the insight of the poet, 
declared that the shot which the embattled 
farmers fired at Concord Bridge was heard 
" round the world," he told the exact truth. 
At that bridge, in that litde New England 
village, the first drum-beat of democracy 
broke upon the troubled air, and there the 
march began. That same drum-beat was 
heard a little later in France, when several 
things happened which Mr. Wells would not 
probably regard as provincial, and which 
caused some stir at the time. Looking over 
the world to-day, it may be fairly said that no 
greater event could be commemorated than 
the first uprising of democracy which swept 
over the Governments of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, and which is still pressing onward, 
crossing even now into the confines of Asia. 
Yet, very characteristically, this American 
Revolution, which Mr. Wells smiles at gently 
as a litde provincial incident, but which seems 
not to have been without its effect on the his- 
tory of civilized man, turned on a question of 
law. That two great branches of the same peo- 
ple, speaking the same language, holding the 
same beliefs, and cherishing the same institu- 
tions, should go to war about a question of 
legal right in the imposition of taxes is indeed 
very typical of the race and breed. It is 
also one reason why the War of the Revolu- 
tion, as a whole, was sullied by few acts of 



cruelty or ferocity, for, as Macaulay pointed 
out long ago, the character of a civil war is 
very largely determined by the amount of op- 
pression which one side has suffered at the 
hands of the other. The government of the 
English colonies in America had been, on the 
whole, easy and liberal. Sir Robert Walpole, 
with his wise indifference which allowed the 
dust to gather upon American despatches, 
and the elder Pitt, who had the faculty of 
arousing the enthusiasm of the colonists by 
appealing to their patriotic impulses and by 
treating them as friends and equals, had made 
the bonds between the mother country and 
her children very strong. But a very dull and 
narrow-minded King, served by Ministers of 
slight capacity or of judiciously pliant natures, 
soon undid the work of the two great Minis- 
ters and forced on the war which had in it 
at that moment nothing of the inevitable. 
The Revolution thus generated was fought 
out through seven long years, and the Colonies 
won. There was, of course, bitterness of 
feeling on both sides, but none which could 
not have been quickly and easily overcome 
if right methods had been pursued. The 
Americans, it is true, did not carry out the 
treaty properly in regard to the Loyalists, 
and the British, on their side, failed to observe 
it in regard to the relinquishment of the 
Western posts which were an absolute threat 
not only to the expansion but to the very exist- 
ence of the United States. One of the great- 
est achievements of Washington's Adminis- 
tration was the Jay Treaty, and to make this 
settlement with England he sacrificed the 
French alliance, but he removed forever the 
Western menace and cleared the frontier of 
the United States from a danger which in 
time of war might have proved fatal. The 
French Revolution, which destroyed the 
American alliance, divided public opinion in 
the United States, as it did in England, and 
the immediate result was virtual, although 
not declared, war with France, a situation 
that gave England an opportunity to bind her 
former colonies closely to her, which unfortu- 
nately did not seem to English statesmen a 
thing worth doing. Then came the great 
struggle with Napoleon, and again England 
might easily have made her former colonies 
her close friends and allies. This policy in- 
deed was so obvious that it is hard to under- 
stand why even English Ministers failed to 
adopt it. Jefferson, with all his eulogy of 
France and denunciation of England for 
political purposes, was more than ready to 



unite with lier ag^ainst Napoleon if England 
would only have allowed him to do so. but 
after the death of the younger Pitt and the 
dissolution of the Ministry of " All the Tal- 
ents," the English Government fell once more 
into the hands of some very inferior men. 
Ministers of the caliber of Perceval, Castle- 
reagh, and Lord Liverpool, united with ex- 
treme Tories like Lord Eldon, whose ability 
was crippled by their blind prejudices, were 
utterly unable to see the value of friendship 
with the United States and preferred to treat 
their former colonists with a comfortable con- 
tempt. The one very clever man not in oppo- 
sition in those days was Canning, and he did 
more than any one else perhaps by his unfortu- 
nate attitude to drive the United States away 
from England. It was he who said that the 
navy of the United States consisted of " a 
few fir frigates with a bit of bunting at the 
top." For the sake of this not very humor- 
ous alliteration he paid rather heavily in the 
loss of a good many English frigates at a 
later day. 

It is not pleasant to Americans to recall 
the years which preceded our second war 
with England. There was no indignity, no 
humiliation, no outrage, that England on the 
one side and Napoleon on the other did not 
inflict upon the United States. Our Gov- 
ernment submitted and yielded and made 
sacrifices which it is now difficult to con- 
template with calmness, until at last a party 
arose composed of young men who were pro- 
foundly convinced that anything was better 
than such conditions, and that if we were to 
have a National existence worth having we 
must fight. They did not care very much with 
whom we fought, but they were determined 
to fight some one in order to vindicate the 
right of the United States to live as a Nation 
without dishonor. The unscrupulous dex- 
terity of Napoleon and the marvelous stupidity 
of England resulted in our fighting England 
instead of France, and thus we came to 
the War of 1812. 

We had no army and a very small navy. 
The political group which had forced war 
upon us, although right in their reasons for 
going to war, were utterly wrong in the 
ignorant boasts with which they proclaimed 
our readiness for battle. Wholly unpre- 
pared, we suffered many defeats on the 
Canadian frontier, which were redeemed only 
by the two battles of Lundy's Lane and 
Chippewa. On the seas and lakes we had 
almost unbroken victory, and, finally at New 



Orleans, after peace had reall\- be^n made, 
but before it was known, Jackson defeated the 
veterans of Wellington's Peninsula campaigns 
with' a thoroughness and a severity which 
were so marked that the battle is hardly alluded 
to in British histories, and must therefore be 
relegated to the provincial class of historical 
events. So the war came to an end before it 
had lasted three years, and when the Treaty 
of Ghent was signed that instrument did not 
contain the settlement of a single one of the 
questions which had made the war unavoid- 
able and for which the United States had 
fought. Yet, none the less, the war had set- 
ded all those questions. Never again did 
England attempt to stop an American man- 
of-war or an American merchantman and 
take seamen, whom she claimed as deserters, 
from their decks. Never again did she at- 
tempt to interfere with American commerce. 
Whatever losses the United States might 
have suffered in the war, however much her 
pride might have been wounded by the 
destruction of the Capitol at Washington, the 
real victory was with the Americans. They 
had fought, and they had gained what they 
fought for. They sacrificed nothing — not an 
inch of territory — by so doing. The only 
losses suffered by the United States were in 
men and money, and by those losses we 
had put an end forever to the humiliating 
treatment which had been meted out to 
us during the first decade of the century. 
As the years passed by all this became 
apparent, and it is now perfectly plain 
that the War of 1812 achieved the result 
for which it was fought, by establishing the 
position of the United States as an inde- 
pendent Nation and restoring the National 
self-respect. Although the Treaty of Ghent 
did not show it, we have but to look behind 
the curtain which the hand of time has drawn 
aside in order to learn that the men of that 
day in England recognized what had hap- 
pened, although they might not admit it to 
themselves, much less to the public. They 
confessed the truth in man}- ways, none the 
less clearly because the confession was indi- 
rect. 

Take, for example, this letter from Mr. 
James, the naval historian, to Mr. Canning : 

MR. W. JAMES TO MR. CANNING. 

"Perry Vale, near Sydenham, Kent: Jany. 9, 1827 

" The menacing tone of the American 
President's message is now the prevailing 
topic of conversation, more especially among 



the mercantile men in whose company I 
daily travel to and from town. One says 
' We had better cede a point or two rather 
than go to War with the United States.' 
' Yes,' says another, ' for we shall get nothing 
but hard knocks there.' 'True,' adds a 
third, ' and what is worse than all, our sea- 
men are half afraid to meet the Americans 
at sea.' Unfortunately this depression of 
feeling, this cowed spirit, prevails very gen- 
erally over the community, even among per- 
sons well informed on other subjects, and 
who, were a British seaman to be named 
with a Frenchman or Spaniard, would scoff 
at the comparison." ^ 

The words of Mr. James show the effect 
upon the public mind in England of the 
American naval victories, which so pro- 
foundly interested Napoleon. They pene- 
trated so deeply that they actually reached 
the intelligence of the Liverpools and the 
Castlereaghs. Even they felt the meaning 
to England's prestige as a naval power of 
losing eleven out of thirteen single ship 
actions and two flotilla engagements on the 
Great Lakes. Their alarm can be measured 
by the honors they conferred on Captain 
Broke, who commanded the Shannon when 
she defeated the Chesapeake — higher honors 
than Nelson received for his brilliant service 
in the batde of Cape St. Vincent. Nor was 
this all. Despite their contempt for the 
Americans and their loud assertions of satis- 
faction with their successes, as the war drew 
to its close the Ministers became so fright- 
ened that they proposed to send Wellington 
to America to command their armies on the 
very scene of the victories which they so 
loudly proclaimed. The Duke's letters in 
regard to this proposal are most instructive, 
and reveal the real results of the war, for 
Wellington was never the victim of illusions. 
He had the great faculty of looking facts in 
the face. 

On the 9th of November, 1814, he wrote 
from Paris to Lord Liverpool as follows : 

" I have already told you and Lord Bath- 
urst that I feel no objection to going to 
America, though I don't promise to myself 
much success there. I believe there are 
troops enough there for the defense of 
Canada forever, and even for the accom- 
plishment of any reasonable offensive plan 
that could be formed from the Canadian 
frontier. I am quite sure that all the Ameri- 



■ ■■ Canning Correspondeice.' 
Vol. II. p. 340. 



Edited by E. J. Stapleton. 



can armies of which I have ever read would 
not beat out of a field of battle the troops 
that went from Bordeaux last summer, if 
common precautions and care were taken of 
them. 

" That which appears to me to be wanting 
in America is not a General, or General 
officers and troops, but a naval superiority 
on the Lakes. Till that superiority is ac- 
quired, it is impossible, according to my 
notion, to maintain an army in such a situa- 
tion as to keep the enemy out of the whole 
frontier, much less to make any conquest 
from the enemy, whibh, with those superior 
means, might, with reasonable hopes of suc- 
cess, be undertaken. I may be wrong in this 
opinion, but I think the whole history of the 
war proves its truth ; and I suspect that you 
will find that Prevost will justify his misfor- 
tunes, which, by the by, I am quite certain 
are not what the Americans represented them 
to be, by stating that the navy were defeated, 
and even if he had taken Fort Mason he must 
have retired. The question is, whether we 
can acquire this naval superiority on the 
Lakes. If we can't, I shall do you but little 
good in America ; and I shall go there only 
to prove the truth of Prevost's defense, and 
to sign a peace which might as well be signed 
now. There will always, however, remain 
this advantage, that the confidence which I 
have acquired will reconcile both the army 
and people in England to terms of which they 
would not now approve. 

" In regard to your present negotiations, I 
confess that I think you have no right from 
the state of the war to demand any conces- 
sion of territory from America. Considering 
everything, it is my opinion that the war has 
been a most successful one, and highly honor- 
able to the British arms ; but from particular 
circumstances, such as the want of the naval 
superiority on the Lakes, you have not been 
able to carry it into the enemy's territory, not- 
withstanding your military success, and now 
undoubted military superiority, and have not 
even cleared your own territory of the enemy 
on the point of attack. You cannot then, on 
any principle of equality in negotiation, claim 
a cession of territory excepting in exchange 
for other advantages which you have in your 
power. 

"I put out of the question the possession 
taken by Sir John Sherbrooke between the 
Penobscot and Passamaquoddy Bay. It is 
evidently only temporary, and till a larger 
force will drive away the few companies he 



has left there : and an officer might as well 
claim the sovereignty of the ground on which 
his piquets stand, or over which his patrols 
pass. 

" Then if this reasoning be true, why- 
stipulate for the nti possidetis ? You can get 
no territory ; indeed the state of your mili- 
tary operations, however creditable, does not 
entitle you to demand any ; and you only 
afford the Americans a popular and creditable 
ground which, I believe, their Government 
are looking for, not to break off the negotia- 
tions, but to avoid to make peace. If 5'ou 
had territory, as I hope you soon will have 
New Orleans, I should prefer to insist upon 
the cession of that province as a separate 
article than upon the //// possidetis as a prin- 
ciple of negotiation." 

And again, on November 18, 1814, he 
wrote to the Earl of Liverpool : 

" I have already told you that I have no 
objection to going to America, and I will go 
whenever I may be ordered. But does it 
not occur to your Lordship that, by appoint- 
ing me to go to America at this moment, you 
g^ve ground for belief all over Europe that 
your affairs there are in a much worse situa- 
tion than they really are .' And will not my 
nomination at this moment be a triumph to 
the Americans and their friends here and 
elsewhere ? It will give satisfaction, and 
that only momentary, in England ; and it may 
have the effect of raising hopes and expecta- 
tions there which, we know, cannot be real- 
ized." 

Despite the " military successes," Welling- 
ton did not think that England could make 
any demand for territory or compensation, 
which shows that the "successes" had been 
as barren as they were trivial. The invinci- 
ble troops from Bordeaux were badly beaten 
by Jackson, and Pakenham, one of Welling- 
ton's favorite generals, was killed, so that he 
did not capture New Orleans, as the Duke 
expected. 

The result was a treaty of peace that 
on its face only brought peace, which the 
Duke evidently thought was all England 
could expect. There need not have been any 
war between England and the United States 
in 1812 if England had only seen fit to make 
the United States a friend instead of a foe. 
But England did not so will, and the war 
taught her that the United States could no 
longer be bullied and outraged with impunity. 
Thus the War of 1812 brought, after all, a 
peace worth having, and laid the foundations 



for that larger peace which has lasted for a 
hundred jears. During that time, through 
many vicissitudes, the relations of the two 
countries have so improved that we are now 
warranted in believing, what all reflecting 
men earnestly hope, that another war between 
England and the United States has become 
an impossibility. 

These larger results of the war, so plainly 
to be seen now, were not of course imme- 
diately apparent. The old attitude was still 
too fixed, the old habits still too strong, to 
be abandoned in a moment. We made a 
brief treaty of commerce and navigation 
with England in June, 1815, six months 
after the conclusion of the Treaty of Ghent, 
but this treaty disposed of none of the out- 
standing questions as to which the Treaty of 
Ghent had been silent, and some of these 
thus passed over were of a nature which 
imperatively required settlement. A British 
officer, unconscious apparently that a war 
had been fought, undertook to search some 
of our vessels upon the Great Lakes, a little 
eccentricity which was-not repeated. Despite 
the agreement of the Ghent Treaty, England 
held on to Astoria and the posts in the 
extreme Northwest, and, what was still worse, 
she also attempted to take the ground that 
our fishing rights, determined by the treaty 
of 1783, had been extinguished by the war. 
Acting on this opinion, British cruisers seized 
American fishing vessels, and the condition 
of affairs on the coasts of Nova Scotia. Can- 
ada, and Newfoundland became serious in 
the extreme. Mr. Adams, then Minister of 
the United States in London, brought these 
questions to the attention of Lord Castle- 
reagh, urging upon him the necessity of fur- 
ther treaties to settle these disputes, to extend 
the commercial convention of 1815, and to 
make some agreement in regard to the slaves 
who had been carried off after the conclusion 
of the war, as well as with reference to the 
disputed northwestern boundary. His discus- 
sions with Lord Castlereagh, which are de- 
tailed at length in his diary, were fruitless, 
and the British Cabinet declined at that time 
to enter upon further negotiations. It may 
be inferred that they did not think it worth 
while to take any steps toward improving 
their relations with the American people. 
Soon after these conferences with Lord Cas- 
tlereagh Mr. Adams returned to the United 
States in order to take his place in President 
Monroe's Cabinet on the 4th of March, 1817, 
and Mr. Rush succeeded him as Minister at 



London. Once more an effort to come to a 
further agreement on some, at least, of the out- 
standing questions was made, and Mr. Rush 
was instructed that if England would assent, 
Mr. Gallatin, who was our Minister at Paris, 
would be joined with him in the negotiations. 
Then it was that the effects of the war 
began to be really apparent. The exaspera- 
tion caused b}' the seizure of our fishing 
vessels and by the refusal to carry out the 
provisions of the Treaty of Ghent on the 
northwest coast made it evident that if some- 
thing was not done the two countries would 
again be involved in hostilities. This danger, 
which would have made no impression upon 
the minds of the British Ministers ten years 
earlier, was now effective, and England's 
action showed that she was no longer ready 
to go to extremes. The Ministry changed its 
attitude and assented to a new negotiation. 
The result was the Treaty of 1818, by which 
England admitted in principle the American 
contention that the fishing rights conceded in 
1783 were final in their nature and could not 
be abrogated by war. Mr. Rush and Mr. 
Gallatin, moreover, succeeded in obtaining 
larger concessions in this respect than their 
instructions called for, and the American fish- 
ing rights within the three-mile limit, and also 
the right to dry and cure on the coast, were 
recognized as to certain portions of Newfound- 
land, Nova Scotia, and Canada. The treaty 
also disposed of the boundary from the Lake 
of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains, and 
from there westward to the ocean the coun- 
try was left open to the occupation of the sub- 
jects and citizens of both Powers for a term 
of ten years. The commercial convention 
was extended and provision was made for the 
settlement of American claims on account of 
the slaves who had been carried away by 
referring the whole matter to the decision of 
some friendly sovereign. Nothing was said 
about the subject of seamen's rights, which 
had been so largely the cause of the war. 
The Treaty of 1818 was as silent on this 
topic as the Treaty of Ghent, but this ques- 
tion had in reality been settled by the war 
itself, for England, having found that the 
theme was one upon which the United States 
was ready to fight, quiedy allowed her claims 
in this direction to die away. 

Four years after the Treaty of 1818, and 
in accordance with the fifth article, the ques- 
tion of compensation for slaves or <jther prop- 
erty carried away after the war was referred 
to the Emperor of Russia, as arbitrator, 



and the Emperor's award decided that the 
United States was entitled to just indemnifi- 
cation for all such private property taken by 
the British forces, and more especially for 
all such slaves as were carried away from the 
places and territories for the restitudon of 
which the treaty stipulated. The adoption 
of the Treaty of 1818 was also the signal for 
the restoration to the United States of 
Astoria and the other points on the coast of 
the extreme northwest. In this way the 
Treaty of 1818, and the award of the Em- 
peror of Russia, which grew out of it, 
brought the relations of the two countries 
into a better condidon than they had been in 
since the close of the American Revolution, 
and these treaties may be said to have con- 
stituted the first step toward the improve- 
ment of those relations which were desdned 
to grow better, although with many checks 
and hindrances, for one hundred years to 
come. 

The two countries were also drawn nearer 
together by holding the same attitude in 
regard to the revolting colonies of Spain in 
South America, and by their common dislike 
and distrust of the principles of the Holy 
Alliance. When Canning broke away from 
the somewhat musty Toryism which thought 
everything was to go on just as of old, and 
as if the French Revolution had never hap- 
pened, he not only powerfully aided the 
South American republics, but he greatly 
strengthened the position of the United 
States. Canning did not at all approve of 
the extended form which his policy took on 
in the Monroe Doctrine, but his work could 
not be undone, and a common sympathy 
and a common policy in the South American 
struggle for freedom drew Great Britain and 
the United States closely together in the 
eyes of the world, and, also, although to a 
less degree, in their own estimation. 

After the award of the Emperor in regard 
to indemnity for the slaves carried off by the 
British forces in the War of 1812, there was, 
with the exception of the conventions of 
1827, renewing and extending the Treaty of 
1818 and providing for an arbitration of the 
disputed northeastern boundary, no inter- 
national transaction involving serious differ- 
ences, and no treaty between the two Gov- 
ernments of Great Britain and the United 
States, for twenty years. The marked' effect 
which the War of 1812, as I have pointed 
out, had produced upon the attitude of 
England toward the United States was, how- 



ever, very largely confined to the intercourse of 
the two Governments. That intercourse had 
become what in diplomatic parlance is termed 
" correct," and the old tone, so familiar in 
British despatches before the War of 1812, 
when the Ministry treated the United States 
as if it were a collection of African tribes, and 
therefore not entitled to the ordinary good 
manners of international relations, wholly 
disappeared. Officially we had forced our 
way into the family of nations, and had 
secured the customary courtesies which inter- 
national intercourse demands. Yet this im- 
provement, which was of the first impor- 
tance, did not go very far toward altering the 
feeling which existed among the peoples of 
the two countries toward each other. Our 
intercourse with Great Britain after the 
Treaty of 1818 entered upon another phase 
quite outside the scope of governmental 
action, which in its result did more last- 
ing harm to the cause of genuine friendship 
between the two countries than all the 
best efforts of diplomatists or public men on 
either side could remedy or undo. Prior to 
the War of 1812 many books and much 
writing in reviews and newspapers appeared 
in England which treated of the United 
States in the most unfavorable manner, and 
in a spirit which at times might fairly be 
called malignant. This systematic defama- 
tion was carried on so generally and so per- 
sistently that it gave rise to a fixed belief in 
the United States not only that it was part 
of a deliberate plan, but that some of the 
writers, like Moore, Ashe, and Parkinson, 
were actually in the pay of the British Gov- 
ernment, and that they wrote for the purpose 
of inflaming English hostility toward every- 
thing American, and of preventing emigra- 
tion to England's former colonies. During 
those early years of the century the people 
of the United States seem to have had the 
good sense to treat these criticisms with 
indifference ; and when the controversy be- 
tween the countries culminated in war, in 
the presence of real fighting attacks made in 
print fell unnoticed from the press. After 
the war, however, and after the settlement 
of the commercial relations of the two coun- 
tries by the Treaty of 1818, the habit of 
depreciadng and libeling the United States, 
either in books or in more ephemeral publi- 
cations, entered upon a new phase. Any 
one who will take the trouble to examine 
what was written in England about the 
United States during the period from 1820 



to 1850 will find it difficult to avoid the 
belief that the assaults upon the Amer- 
ican people were systematic in their nature. 
Those who are curious in such matters can 
find an admirable summary in Mr. McMas- 
ter's history, where the English comments 
upon the United States from 1820 to 1840 
are vividly described. It seems almost in- 
credible that such things could have been said 
and written by one ostensibly friendly people 
about another people who spoke the same 
language and inherited the same political 
traditions. There were, without doubt, many 
things in the United States of that day which 
were open to just criticism. No successful 
defense, for example, could be entered be- 
fore the 'tribunal of the civilized world in 
behalf of Negro slavery. But the English 
critics did not confine themselves to that 
which was deserving of criticism. Every- 
thing in the United States was to them 
anathema. The great reviews gave many 
pages to depicting what the United States 
was as they beheld and interpreted it. Rob- 
ert Southey in the " Quarterly," and Sydney 
Smith in the " Edinburgh," were only two of 
the most distinguished among the many 
writers great and small who devoted them- 
selves not merely to criticising but to slander- 
ing the United States. They were not 
ashamed to effect their purpose by telling 
the most absolute falsehoods, and the lengths 
to which they went seem now well-nigh 
incredible. The men of America were said 
to be " turbulent citizens, abandoned Chris- 
tians, inconstant husbands, unnatural fathers, 
and treacherous friends." The men who 
had whipped English vessels in eleven single 
ship fights out of thirteen were accused 
of having run away shamefully when they 
could not fight to advantage. As they 
generally fought to advantage at sea, they 
had not often run away. " In the Southern 
parts of the Union," says another calm thinker 
and judicious critic, " the rights of our holy 
faith are almost never practiced ; one-third of 
the people have no church at all. The re- 
ligious principle is gaining ground in the 
northern parts of the Union. It is becoming 
fashionable among the better orders of soci- 
ety to go to church." It is interesting to 
consider this picture of church-going becom- 
ing fashionable among the descendants of 
the Puritans, but the writers had forgotten, 
probably, that New England was settled when 
i( was a wilderness by people who went there, 
as Carlyle puts it, because they wanted to 



hear a sermon pieached in their own way. 
" The supreme felicity of a true-born Ameri- 
can is inaction of body and inanity of mind," 
is another description of the people of the 
United States, and the reproach of inactivity 
is one of the most comic ever addressed to 
Americans even at that time. Then, of 
course, the British critics had a great deal to 
s:iy about our total lack of literature and the 
entire absence among us of any men of dis- 
tinction. Franklin, we were informed, had 
elicited some useful discoveries, but that was 
because he had lived in England for some 
time. It might be suggested that there 
were many other persons dwelling in England 
whose residence in that favored island had 
failed to make them capable of eliciting Frank- 
lin's useful discoveries. It was also predicted 
that he would not be remembered for fifty 
years. Prophecies of fame are always peril- 
ous, and it is to be feared that Franklin is a 
good deal better remembered to-day than 
Sydney Smith or Southey — ^the most consider- 
/ able of our critics in those days — and more 
read, too, if we may judge from the fact that 
every civilized nation not long since sent emi- 
nent representatives to Philadelphia to cele- 
brate the two hundredth anniversary of his 
birth, a ceremony which seems to have been 
omitted in the case of Southey and Sydney 
Smith when a century had elapsed after their 
coming into the world. Robert Fulton, it 
was asserted, stole his invention from seeing 
the sailing ships which ran on the Clyde with 
steam power in 1787, although no mention is 
made elsewhere of the persons who per- 
formed that feat, which does not seem to 
have traveled beyond the Clyde, and which is 
just as veracious as the statement, also made 
at that time, that Fulton was born in Paisley 
in Scotland, when in reality he had the mis- 
fortune to be born in Pennsylvania. 

These instances give a very faint impres- 
sion of English criticism upon America at 
that time, although such stuff is hardly to 
be dignified by the name of criticism. It 
was in reality childish and rather ignorant 
abuse. But now, contrary to what had hap- 
pened in the earlier years, the Americans, 
unfortunately, were roused into taking it 
up and making elaborate replies. They 
had not much difficulty in controverting 
the false statements and misrepresentations 
so freely made, but they did not stop there. 
They naturally availed themselves of the 
/// qtioque argument, and it was not at all 
difficult in the history of England to find 



facts which, with appropriate twists and 
bendings, made the English people appear 
in a very unenviable light. 

This warfare of books and magazine articles 
continued and was much emphasized and 
embittered when it was taken up on a large 
scale by popular writers like Mrs. Trollope 
and Captain Hall, but everything else sank 
into insignificance compared to the effect of 
one book, much more temperate than any of 
the others, but written by a great genius who 
saw fit later to sharpen what he had said in a 
book of travels by carrying his animosity into 
the realms of fiction. Charles Dickens came to 
the United States in 1841. He was received 
with an outburst of affectionate and admiring 
enthusiasm which has rarely been seen any- 
where in the case of a man of letters. He 
went home and wrote a book about us called 
" American Notes," and then he immortalized 
certain types of American character in 
" Martin Chuzzlewit." He said a great 
deal that was very true and entirely deserved. 
The characters of the novel were unfortu- 
nately in many respects only too real, and, 
deeply angered as we were at the time, it 
may be safely said that Elijah Pogram and 
Jefterson Brick and Hannibal Chollop, Gen- 
eral Choke and Mrs. Hominy have an immor- 
tality more assured among the American 
people than anywhere else, for the anger has 
long since died away, while the truth of the 
satire and the comicality of these beings cre- 
ated by the magic touch of genius still re- 
main. But at the time the resentment was 
intense. Whether what was said was just 
or unjust, true or untrue, there was a wide- 
spread feeling in the United States that, who- 
ever else might find fault with and ridicule us, 
Charles Dickens, after the reception which 
had been given him, was debarred by every 
rule of loyalty and good manners from doing 
so. That this feeling was natural and that 
the rule was one which could be both accepted 
and observed was made visible to all men 
not long after the visit of Dickens. 

A few years later another great English 
novelist came to the United States ; came 
twice, in fact. He, too, delivered lectures. 
No doubt, with his keen and penetrating ob- 
servation, he perceived many things which 
lent themselves to criticism, to ridicule, and 
to satire, of which no living writer was more 
capable than he. He was by temperament 
very sensitive to just those shortcomings which 
are common and repellent in a crude and un- 
formed society. He was urged in everyway 



and tempted with the promise of great profits 
to write a book about America, but he de- 
clined. He had been cordially received in 
the United States ; he had lived in our 
houses ; he had accepted our hospitality ; 
only kindness had been shown him. Others 
might write what they pleased about Amer- 
ica, but he would not. In other words, 
Thackeray was a gentleman. Let me recall 
what he himself said in a " Roundabout " 
paper : 

" Yonder drawing was made in a country 
where there was such hospitality, friendship, 
kindness, shown to the humble designer that 
his eyes do not care to look for faults or his 
pen to note them. . . . How hospitable they 
were, those Southern men ! In the North 
itself the welcome was not kinder, as I, who 
had eaten Northern and Southern salt, can 
testify !" 

How kind and generous it all is, and how 
pleasant it is now, to every one who loves the 
, memory of the genius that created Becky 
Sharp and drew the character of Colonel 
Newcome, to know that he was, above all 
things, loyal and true. We had on our own 
side, too, a distinguished man of letters whose 
conception of his duty toward the two na- 
tions who read his books was ■ to cherish 
friendship and kindliness and not to seek for 
faults and embitter feelings. Let me describe 
him in Thackeray's words, for they both 
thought alike in this great matter which in- 
volves nothing less than good will among 
men : 

" Two men, famous, admired, beloved, 
have just left us, the Goldsmith and Gibbon 
of our time. . . . One was the first Ambas- 
sador whom the New World of Letters sent 
to the Old. He was born almost with the 
republic ; the pater patriiB had laid his hand 
on the child's head. He bore Washington's 
name ; he came amongst us bringing the 
kindest sympathy, the most artless, smiling 
good will. His new country (which some 
people here might be disposed to regard 
rather superciliously) could send us, as he 
showed in his own person, a gentleman who, 
though himself born in no very high sphere, 
was most finished, polished, easy, witty, quiet; 
and, socially, the equal of the most refined 
Europeans. If Irving's welcome in England 
was a kind one, was it not also gratefully 
remembered ? If he ate our salt, did he not 
pay us with a thankful heart ? Who can cal- 
culate the amount of friendliness and good 
feeling for our country which this writer's 



generous and untiring regard for us dissemi- 
nated in his own ? His books are read by 
millions of his countrymen ; whom he has 
taught to love England, and why to love 
her. It would have been easy to speak 
otherwise than he did ; to inflame national 
rancors, which, at the time when he first be- 
came known as a public writer, war had just 
renewed ; to cry down the old civilization at 
the expense of the new ; to point out our 
faults, arrogance, shortcomings, and give the 
republic to infer how much she was the 
parent state's superior. There are writers 
enough in the United States, honest and 
otherwise, to preach that kind of doctrine. 
But the good Irving, the peaceful, the 
friendly, had no place for bitterness in his 
heart, and no scheme but kindness." 

Unfortunately, the example of Irving and 
Thackeray had but few imitators. Every- 
thing which these two said and wrote or 
omitted to say and write was forgotten in the 
clash of men who took a precisely opposite 
course, to the great detriment of all con- 
cerned, and the bitterness was concentrated 
around the " American Notes " and their 
author, whom the American people had loved 
and honored and taken to their hearts. It 
was this feeling that the man whom they 
had admired and cheered and feasted 
had been disloyal which made Dickens's 
criticism and ridicule rankle more than that 
of all others. But if we leave the personal 
equation aside, Dickens was only the cul- 
mination of the general commentary which 
England then made and apparently thought 
it well to make upon the United States. 
Both people spoke and read the same lan- 
guage. In those days they were still closely 
akin. We read English books, copied Eng- 
lish fashions, and looked up to English stand- 
ards in society and in literature, and there- 
fore all that was said in England of the kind 
which has just been indicated went home and 
made Americans very angry and very sore. 
We were a new people, or rather we were 
the offspring of an old people settled in a 
new country, and we were young, very self- 
conscious, very sensitive, and we felt attacks 
which would be no more noticed to-day than 
the ratde of a dead autumn leaf fluttering 
before the wind. We replied to the criti- 
cisms in a savage and intemperate manner. 
Sometimes we wounded; generally we pro- 
duced no effect. What we felt most w^as 
the injustice of painting everything black. 
As I have already said, there was a great 



10 



deal in America to be criticised. Dickens's 
wrath about copyright was wholly justifiable. 
Our own literary possessions were still meager, 
and so we stood like highwaymen along the 
roadside of literature and robbed the passers- 
by, the very men who " helped us to enjoy 
life or taught us to endure it." It was 
utterly indefensible and wholly dishonest. 
The default on the State bonds, especially 
upon those of Pennsylvania, which edged the 
blade of Sydney Smith, who was a personal 
loser, was not only indefensible, but utterly 
discreditable. To the great reproach of 
slavery there was, of course, no reply, no 
excuse to be made. But those dark spots 
were not the whole picture, and yet by gross 
misrepresentation, and even by actual false- 
hood, the effort was made to prove that everj'- 
thing was black. For instance, in " Martin 
Chuzzlewit " the impression is sedulously and 
strongly given that the entire United States 
west of the Alleghanies is one huge swamp 
breathing forth fever and ague. No doubt 
such spots existed then, and exist now, 
but as a description of so large a country as 
the United States it was not strictly accurate. 
Yet such was the prevailing tone. Every- 
thing was bad — land, people, institutions. 
The result naturally was that the just criti- 
cism had no effect and was merely lost in the 
cloud of invective and abuse. Many of the 
deficiencies were those which time alone could 
supply, but this was not stated any more than 
it was admitted that there was also in Amer- 
ica much that was good and not a little that 
was great. In the days when we were still 
colonies Edmund Burke and the elder Pitt 
pictured the people of America and what 
they had achieved in language to which Par- 
liament listened then, and which the world 
has heeded ever since. In the first half of 
the nineteenth century the American people 
were engaged in the conquest of a continent ; 
they were bringing a wilderness within the 
grasp of civilized man, and at the same time 
they were making a great experiment in gov- 
ernment, and had established religious free- 
dom and individual liberty on a scale never 
known before. Their political example had 
affected the entire Western world, and this 
was really the underlying reason for the 
attacks upon them, because their success 
alarmed the ruling classes of England and of 
Europe, which were likewise the vocal classes, 
in command of the press and the platform. 
None the less, these were things quite as 
worthy of note as our crude manners, our 



rough ways on the \\'estern frontier, our lack 
of the luxuries of wealth, and of the many 
other lesser things in which we fell short of 
the European standards. But the good was 
never noticed and the bad was exaggerated 
beyond the bounds of truth. With the ex- 
ception of what Dickens wrote, everything 
then said and written in regard to the United 
States and its people is quite forgotten, ex- 
cept by the historian, and is as dead to the 
world as the nun who has taken the black 
veil. But looking back over that time, the 
period of the English commentators on 
America, one can see very plainly now the 
infinite mischief which was done. In point 
of taste and good feeling there is little to 
choose between the English attacks upon the 
United States and those of Americans upon 
England, although we had the great disad- 
vantage of feeling much more keenly about 
it than our adversaries. Yet England her- 
self was sensitive enough when Emerson and 
Hawthorne, two really great writers, ventured, 
in the most perfectly proper and temperate 
way, to point out that in certain respects the 
English people were, after all, merely human. 
Emerson and Hawthorne, of course, are still 
read and remembered, quite as much as 
Dickens, but they do not come within the 
class that I have been trying to describe. 
They were later, and their tone was larger 
and more modern, their criticism more subtle, 
their praise ample, and their temper fair. 
During the time which I have attempted to 
portray the harm done was very great. Eng- 
lishmen gave comparatively little attention to 
us or to what we thought or said, but the 
attacks of her writers upon the United States, 
running through a long period of years, bred a 
bitter hatred of England among the American 
people, which has gradually and fortunately 
turned into a cold indifference, and this, in 
turn, it is to be hoped, will become some- 
thing more and better than occasional friend- 
ship between individual members of the two 
nations. 

The question which arises in one's mind in 
contemplating that time is whether, on the 
whole, it paid England and was profitable to 
her to breed enmity and bitterness in a coun- 
try which had every natural disposition to be 
her friend. The Government had ceased to 
aim deliberately at alienating the United 
States after the Treaty of Ghent was made ; 
and then it was that English writers, great 
and small, took up the work which the Gov- 
ernment, for the lime at least, had abandoned. 



11 



Their operations were less dang-erous because 
the issues of peace and war did not lie in 
their hands, but in creating a settled hate on 
the part of one people for another they were 
more effective than diplomatists and Ministers, 
because they wounded personal pride and 
made each member of the community feel 
humiliation or anger, according to his temper- 
ament, in his own particular person. To- 
day such writings on the part of the Eng- 
lish or any other nation would produce no 
effect of the slightest seriousness in the 
United States. After nations pass a cer- 
tain point in their rise to greatness abuse 
by inhabitants of other countries may make 
the person uttering the abuse unpopular, 
but has less than no effect upon the nation 
or people abused. Between 1820 and 1850, 
when the United States was still struggling 
in the first stages of nation-building, when 
it was still largely a wilderness and its pioneers 
were forcing the frontier westward with 
daring and painful effort, this unmeasured 
abuse and savage criticism, whether just 
'or not, was deeply felt. That it had an im- 
proving or instructive effect upon Ameri- 
cans, in view of the manner in which the 
instruction was administered, may well be 
doubted, but in making them angry and in 
turning them against England, and causing 
them to look with the friendly eyes of prefer- 
ence on almost every other nation, it was 
highly successful. In the relations of two 
great nations, speaking the same language 
and believing in the same political principles, 
it is not a pleasant period to look upon in the 
cold light of half a century later ; yet I think, 
if rightly considered, it is not without its 
lesson, not only to those concerned, but to 
all who wish to maintain good relations 
among the nations of the earth. 

During this same period, which may be 
called, as I have said, the period of the com- 
mentators and the critics, certain events 
occurred of a much more immediately serious 
nature, and which brought the two countries 
to the verge of war. In the nature of things, 
we were certain to have many more matters 
of difference with Great Britain than with 
any other country, because her provinces lay 
to the north of the United States and fur- 
nished a common boundary line three thou- 
sand miles in length. What was much worse 
was the fact that this boundary line was left 
largely unsettled by the treaties of 1818 and 
1827. One of the three treaties of 1827 
provided for arbitration as to the northeast 



boundary, and the question was referred to 
the King of Holland as arbitrator. In 1831 
the King rendered a decision, but as he 
really decided only two points and merely 
expressed an opinion on all the others, his 
award was rejected by the United States on 
the ground that it was not a decision of the 
questions submitted. Thus the entire matter 
was left open, and serious troubles soon 
began to arise on the northeastern boundary 
between the people of Maine on the one 
side and those of the adjoining British prov- 
inces on the other. An American surveyor 
was arrested. The State of Maine appro- 
priated money and sent a force of men in 
Aroostook County to the border. There 
were similar difficulties in Madawaska. The 
English Government postponed action, and 
the question began to assume a very angry 
and threatening appearance. Meanwhile 
another disturbance broke out along the New 
York and Vermont frontiers. There had 
been a rebellion in Canada against the bad 
government of that day, and the defeated 
patriots took refuge in the United States, 
where they met with a cordial reception. 
Considerable bodies of volunteers were 
raised. Secret organizations were formed to 
support the rebellious Canadians, a party of 
whom, under the leadership of William 
McKenzie, seized Navy Island, in the Niagara 
River, and fortified it. The authorities in 
Canada despatched Colonel McNab to guard 
the frontier against this invasion, and McNab 
sent out a party which seized and burned the 
steamer Caroline, which had been used to 
convey volunteers and munitions of war to 
Navy Island. The destruction of the Caro- 
line took place at Fort Schlosser, on Amer- 
ican territory, and was, of course, a gross 
violation of the sovereignty of the United 
States. The Government of the United 
States and the State governments behaved 
with entire propriety and broke up and 
checked, so far as they could, the movements 
of the patriots and their sympathizers. Nev- 
ertheless, acts of violence continued on both 
sides. A party of refugees in the Thousand 
Islands crossed to the Canadian side and 
burned the steamer Sir Robert Peel as a set- 
off for the Caroline, while the American 
steamer Telegraph was fired upon. It would 
require a volume of reasonable size to give a 
history of these border troubles, which are 
not without much human interest, but which 
have all fallen quite dim now, and which are 
hardly remembered except by the historian. 



12 



In a brief review of the relations of England 
and the United States during one hundred 
years it is impossible to do more than allude 
to them. It must suffice to say here that 
the whole border from Maine to Michigan 
was not only disturbed, but in a most inflamed 
and explosive condition. It was just one of 
those situations where war might have been 
precipitated at any moment by reckless men 
who were quarreling over the possession of 
land and where a rebellion existed in one coun- 
try which excited warm sympathy in the other. 
In addition, a case arose, growing out of the 
destruction of the Caroline, which aroused 
animosities even more than the actual troubles 
along the border. An American named 
Durfee had been shot and killed on the Car- 
oline. Two years later a Canadian named 
Alexander McLeod came down from Canada 
and while he was drunk bragged of having 
himself killed Durfee. He was, of course, 
arrested, although it was afterwards shown 
that he had not been present at the de- 
struction of the Caroline. But on his own 
admission it was perfectly proper to arrest 
him. The crime had been committed on 
American soil and McLeod had confessed 
himself to be the guilty man, yet none the less 
the English Government flew into a great 
rage and undertook to interfere with the 
action of the courts. Not content with this, 
they also saw fit to offer their advice in regard 
to the case of the Amistad, a Spanish vessel 
which had been seized by the slaves which she 
was carrying and had been run ashore at 
Long Island, where she was taken possession 
of by the Government. There was a very 
serious question as to what was to be done 
with the Negroes, but no part of the question 
concerned England the least in the world, and 
her benevolent advice, coming just at that 
moment, was deeply resented. In this condi- 
tion of public sentiment, with England on the 
edge of declaring war on account of McLeod, 
and with the popular feeling in the United 
States greatly excited by the border troubles 
and the case of the Amistad, the Democrats 
went out of power and the Whigs came in, 
with Mr. Webster as Secretary of State. The 
situation was one of extreme and dangerous 
complexity. The British having avowed the 
destrucdon of the Caroline to be a Govern- 
mental act, it was obvious that McLeod could 
not properly be held, but his case was in the 
State courts of New York, over the proceed- 
ings of which the United States had no con- 
trol. Mr. Webster endeavored to secure the 



discharge of McLeod, but in vain, and the 
New York courts refused to grant a writ of 
habeas corpus. On the other side, Mr. Fox, 
the British Minister, saw fit to take a most 
offensive tone, which Mr. Webster was the 
last man in the world to submit to tamely. 
He took a firm attitude with England, while 
suggesting privately that negotiations should 
be opened for establishing a conventional 
northeastern line, and, as has just been said, he 
used his best efforts to secure the discharge 
of McLeod. This perilous situation was for- 
tunately relieved by two incidents which came 
to pass outside the efforts of the Government. 
McLeod was acquitted at Utica by the simple 
process of proving an alibi ; and the Whigs 
were beaten in England, an event which made 
Lord Aberdeen Secretary of State for Foreign 
Affairs in place of Lord Palmerston. As 
has usually happened since the War of 1812, 
we fared much better with a Tory or Con- 
servative administration than we did with the 
Whigs and the Liberals. Response was now 
made to Mr. Webster's proposal to establish 
a conventional line, and in January, 1842, 
information reached Mr. Webster from Mr. 
Everett that Lord Aberdeen had determined 
to assent to our proposition, and had sent Lord 
Ashburton as special Minister to the United 
States to setde the boundary and all out- 
standing questions. This marked a sharp 
change in the English attitude, and was no 
doubt owing in a measure at least to the 
confidence which was felt in Mr. Webster 
personally. Indeed, it is to Mr. Webster that 
we owe the setdement at that time of ques- 
tions which had been so inflamed by extra- 
neous and accidental circumstances that they 
had brought the two countries to the verge 
of war. 

Mr. Webster's position had throughout 
been one of extreme difficulty. Not only did 
he have to deal with the McLeod case, but the 
border was in a constant ferment and he was 
compelled to be constantly on the alert to pre- 
vent, if possible, outbreaks which might precipi- 
tate hostilities at any moment. In addition to 
all this his own personal situation was most 
trying. General Harrison, who had made him 
Secretary of State, died a month after his inau- 
guration, and, although President Tyler gave 
his entire confidence to Mr. Webster, he im- 
mediately broke with the Whig party, which 
had elected him, and Mr. Webster's posidon 
became, in consequence, a very difficult one. 
The Whigs felt that he ought immediately to 
resign. He was denounced as a traitor to 



13 



Whig principles, and there was much bitter- 
ness of feeling. Mr. Webster, however, 
understood the situation between this country 
and Great Britain better than any oi^e else. 
He knew how dangerous it was. He felt, 
and rightly, that if any one could bring it to 
a peaceful conclusion he could, and that what- 
ever his party associates might say or think, 
it was his plain duty to remain in the Cabinet 
until the English question was settled. Un- 
moved, therefore, by the attacks made upon 
him, he remained at his post, and it was well 
for the country that he did so. Lord Ash- 
burton arrived in the United States on the 
4th of April, 1842, and the result of his 
negotiations with the Secretary of State was 
the agreement known in history as the 
Webster-Ashburton Treaty, which was con- 
cluded on the 9th of August, 1842, and pro- 
claimed in the following November. This 
result, however, was not easily reached, for 
the settlement was surrounded by difficulties, 
owing to the fact that the territory of the two 
States of Maine and Massachusetts was in- 
volved, and Webster could not deal with this 
territory, therefore, with a free hand. It was 
very fortunate that Mr. Webster was a New 
England man, and his personal influence as well 
as the tact he displayed were most effective 
in managing the arrangements with the two 
States. It is not possible to follow the nego- 
tiations in their details, for the discussion 
involved filled volumes at the time and might 
be made to fill volumes now. All that it is 
possible to say here is that the treaty brought 
about, in the first place, a condition of entire 
peace between the two countries and thus put 
an end to one in which war was momentarily 
probable. It settled the northeastern boundary 
and the northern boundary from Lake Huron 
to the Lake of the Woods, together with vari- 
ous matters related to these two questions. 
It also made .an agreement for joint effort 
toward the suppression of the slave trade 
and for joint remonstrances to the other 
Powers against that traffic. It further pro- 
vided in another article for the extradition of 
criminals. As a whole the treaty was a most 
important advance toward the establishment 
of good relations between the two branches 
of the English-speaking people. It was one 
of Mr. Webster's greatest achievements, and, 
in view of the extreme irritation existing and 
the incipient border warfare, it was a very 
remarkable feat. Benton denounced the 
treaty in the Senate as a surrender to Eng- 
land, and Lord Palmerston denounced it in 



Parliament as a surrender by England to the 
United States; from which it may be inferred 
that it was, on the whole, a very fair settle- 
ment. 

The Webster-Ashburton Treaty had, how- 
ever, one defect ; it did not settle our north- 
western boundary beyond the Rocky Moun- 
tains. That region, it will be remembered, 
under the treaties of 1818 and 1827 was left 
to the joint occupation of Great Britain and 
the United States, although Mr. Monroe had 
offered to settle the question by adopting the 
forty-ninth parallel as the line of division. The 
country remained unsettled, but the Hudson 
Bay Company began to push its posts down 
to the Columbia River, and just when Mr. 
Webster was at work on the treaty with Lord 
Ashburton the American movement toward 
Oregon began in earnest. As soon as our 
settlers arrived there troubles at once arose, 
and the question drifted into the domain of 
politics. The failure of the Webster-Ashbur- 
ton Treaty to deal with it and the absorption 
of the Administration in the much greater 
question of the annexation of Texas kept the 
whole matter open with increasing irritation, 
although Mr. Tyler renewed the offer of the 
forty-ninth parallel, to which Great Britain 
paid no attention. The American rights and 
claims were taken up with noisy enthusiasm in 
different parts of the country, and were put 
forward by public meetings in the largest possi- 
ble way. When the election of 1844 came on. 
the Democrats took extreme ground in their 
platform, claiming the whole region which was 
in dispute, and the cry of " Fifty-four forty or 
fight " ran through the campaign. The excite- 
ment was enhanced by the failure of Congress 
to act, for there were many Senators and Rep- 
resentatives from the older parts of the country 
who regarded Oregon as worthless, and who 
resisted all efforts to take action in regard to 
it. Mr. Polk, the Democratic candidate, was 
one of the extremists on the question and in 
favor of the 54-40 line. Nothing could have 
been less desirable than this attitude. It is 
never well to threaten, and it is particularly 
undesirable to threaten unless you mean just 
what you say. The people who were respon- 
sible for the cry of " Fifty- four forty or fight " 
did not really mean to fight for that line, and 
therefore the cry was mere bluster for politi- 
cal purposes. It had, however, the effect of 
inflaming the question, so that there was talk 
of war on both sides of the Atlantic. When 
Mr. Polk came in, he took very extreme 
ground in his inaugural, and this had a still 



14 



worse effect in England, and increased the 
difficulty of a settlement. After all his 
bluster, however, Polk, with the very lame 
excuse that he was involved b}' the acts 
of his predecessor, renewed the offer of the 
forty-ninth parallel, which Mr. Pakenham, 
the British Minister, who was apparently 
about as judicious as Polk, promptly, and, as 
it afterward appeared, without authority, de- 
clined. President Polk in his Message asked 
Congress for authority to terminate the con- 
vention of 1827. Resolutions were passed 
and the convention was terminated. The 
situation had now become so threatening that 
Mr. Webster made a strong speech at Boston 
in which he denounced the folly of going to 
war with England on such a question and 
urged its proper settlement. The speech 
made a deep impression not only in England 
and America, but in Europe. Pakenham, 
under instructions from the Ministry, then 
renewed on his side the offer of the forty-ninth 
parallel, and the valiant Polk accepted it with 
the approval of Congress. The treaty of 1846 
followed, by which the line to the coast was 
settled. We obtained the Oregon country and 
granted to Great Britain the right of naviga- 
tion on the Columbia River. The loss of the 
region between the forty-ninth parallel and 
the line of 54-40 was one of the most severe 
which ever befell the United States. Whether 
it could have been obtained without a war is 
probably doubtful, but it never ought to have 
been said, officially or otherwise, that we 
would fight for 54-40 unless we were fully 
prepared to do so. If we had stood firm for 
the line of 54-40 without threats, it is quite 
possible that we might have succeeded in the 
end ; but the hypotheses of history are of 
little practical value, and the fact remains that 
by the treaty we lost a complete control of 
the Pacific coast. 

It is impossible, nor is it necessary, hereto 
enter into the controversies which arose from 
the annexation of Texas and in which Eng- 
land took no little interest, but the great 
movement of expansion which characterized 
that period brought on another question with 
England which at one time was very serious 
and which resulted in a treaty that was for 
many years a stumbling-block in the way of all 
plans for building an Isthmian canal. From 
the time of Monroe, Clay, and John Quincy 
Adams the construction of an interoceanic 
canal had been one of the cherished desires of 
the United States. It passed through many 
phases, involved as it was in the tortuous and 



revolutionary conditions of Central America, 
but the question finally came to a head after 
the annexation of Texas. Great Britain had 
always, despite treaties to the contrary, main- 
tained a hold on the Mosquito Coast and was 
in the habit of exercising a protectorate over 
a person whom she humorously called the 
" Mosquito King," selected from the worth- 
less savages who inhabited that region. She 
now took advantage of this interest in the 
Mosquito Coast to take possession of San 
Juan, which was at the mouth of the river 
where it was planned to begin the Nicaragua 
Canal. On the other hand, the United States 
engaged in the work of making arrangements 
with the Central American republics and with 
Granada to get possession of the canal routes. 
It is not necessary to follow the treaties 
made by Mr. Hise and later by Mr. Squier 
in which they exceeded their instructions and 
secured for us everything we desired. With 
England at the mouth of the San Juan and 
indulging herself in the seizure of Tigre Island 
and with the United States possessed of 
treaties entered into by the people of the 
countries through which the canal must pass, 
all the conditions were ripe for a very pretty 
quarrel, which thereupon duly arose There 
is no necessity of following it in all its intrica- 
cies, but the result was a treaty hastily made 
by Sir Henry Bulwer. the British Minister, 
and Mr. Clayton, Secretary of State, in 
order to prevent action upon the Squier 
treaty by the Senate. 

The treaty thus made in 1850 provided 
that neither the United States nor Great 
Britain should ever obtain or maintain for 
themselves any exclusive control over the 
ship canal, or maintain any fortifications, 
or assume or exercise any dominion over 
Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito Coast, 
or any part of Central America. The treaty 
further provided for the neutrality of the canal 
in case of war and for the protection of its 
construction, which both Powers promised to 
facilitate. It also arranged for guarantees of 
neutrality and for invitations to other Powers 
to co-operate. This agreement settled the 
outstanding differences between England and 
the United States, but it was pregnant with 
other difficulties hardly less serious. In its 
nature it was an abandonment of the Monroe 
I )octrine, for it provided for bringing in Euro- 
pean Powers to deal with a purely American 
question, and it made it impossible for either 
the United States or Great Britain to build a 
canal without mutual co-operation. In proc- 



15 



ess of time it became necessary to get rid 
of this treaty, which was not a wise one ex- 
cept so far as it removed a subject of great 
irritation at the moment. 

This immediate effect it certainly had, and 
the next transaction between the two Govern- 
ments was the -treaty of 1854, which estab- 
lished reciprocity with Canada, and which, as 
was said at the time, was floated through 
by Lord Elgin upon seas of champagne. 
Although this treaty in its practical operation 
proved a disappointment to the United States, 
it was at least a distinctly friendly arrange- 
ment, and indicates how much relations be- 
tween the United States and Great Britain, 
despite many vicissitudes, had improved since 
the War of 1812. This was shown even 
more emphatically a few years later when the 
Prince of Wales, then a boy of eighteen, 
came to the United States in the year 1860. 
Although the fateful election of that year was 
in progress and the country was torn by the 
political conflict, the Prince was received with 
the utmost cordiality by every one in author- 
ity from the President down and with real 
enthusiasm by the people. That he carried 
away pleasant memories of America was 
made evident throughout his life, and espe- 
cially after he came to the throne, by his 
kindliness and friendship not only toward the 
United States, but toward all Americans. 
What was more important at the time, the 
warmth of his reception in the United States 
deeply gratified the Queen and Prince Albert, 
and was not without a marked influence 
a year later when the relations of the two 
countries and the fate of the American Union 
were trei^ibling in the balance. 

The Elgin Treaty, and, still more, the visit 
of the Prince of Wales just on the eve of the 
Civil War, came at a time when the people of 
the United States were so deeply absorbed 
in the slavery question at home that they had 
little thought to give to their relations with any 
foreign country. The passions aroused by the 
slavery struggle were rising to a great intensity 
and the dark clouds of secession and civil 
war were already gathering upon the horizon. 
With the coming of that war all that had been 
gained in the past years toward the establish- 
ment of permanent and really friendly rela- 
tions between the two countries, which had 
been severed by the American Revolution, 
was lost in a moment. During the years 
which had elapsed between 1815 and 1860 
the most severe reproach uttered by English 
lips against the United States was the con- 



tinued maintenance of Negro slavery. The 
reproach was bitterly felt because 'no answer, 
no explanation, no defense, was possible. 
Now the United States was plunged in civil 
war waged by the North for the preservation 
of the Union, and all the world knew that the 
cause of the North carried with it freedom to 
the slaves. The people of the Northern 
States felt that under these circumstances and 
in that hour of trial the sympathy of England 
would go out to them at once without either 
question or hesitation. To their intense sur- 
prise, the sympathy of England, as expressed 
in her magazines and newspapers and by the 
governing classes, was uniformly hostile. The 
vocal part of English society seemed to be wholly 
in sympathy with the South, and the North 
could not learn until later that the silent 
masses of England were on the side of the 
Union and freedom. The bitterness of hatred 
awakened by the utterances of the English 
press and English public men can hardly be 
realized to-day. Early in the struggle its in- 
tensity was manifested when the Trent affair 
occurred. The act of Wilkes in stopping the 
Trent and taking from her the Southern 
commissioners was entirely indefensible. It 
was a flat contradiction of the American doc- 
trine for which the country had fought in 
1812 ; yet in 1861 the people of the North- 
ern States hailed the action of Wilkes with 
wild delight, and the hatred aroused by the 
English attitude was so great that they were 
quite ready to go to war, although war at 
that moment probably meant the establish- 
ment of the Confederacy and the final sever- 
ance of the Union. This feeling was rife 
not only among the people of the North, but 
among public men in Washington. The atti- 
tude of England in regard to the Trent affair 
was not calculated to improve the situation, 
and yet, in all candor, it must be said that it 
is difficult to see how England could have 
assumed any other position than that which 
she actually took. Fortunately, in his large 
and patient wisdom, President Lincoln was 
able to suppress the very natural feeling 
which he shared with his people, and, looking 
beyond the passions of the moment, had 
the courage to withdraw from the untenable 
situation created by the action of Wilkes. On 
the other hand, English Ministers who were 
only too ready to take advantage of the 
Trent affair in order to precipitate a war 
which would have insured the destruction of 
the United States were sufficiently influenced 
by the wise counsels of Prince Albert, acting 



16 



through the Queen, by whom American kind- 
ness to the Prince of Wales was still freshly 
remembered, to modify a despatch which, if 
unaltered, would almost certainly have 
brought on war and the establishment of the 
Confederacy. Lincoln gave up Mason and 
Slidell, and the country, unconvinced, accepted 
his action. The feeling of the people was 
exactly expressed in Lowell's lines : 

" We give the critters back, John, 

Cos Abram thought 'twas right ; 
It warn't your bullying clack, John, 

Provokin' us to fight. 
Ole Uncle S. sez he, ' I guess 
We've a hard row,' sez he, 

' To hoe jest now ; but thet somehow 
May happen to J. B. 

Ez wal ez you an' me.' " 

The avoidance, by Lincoln'.s action, of 
this great peril did not, however, alter — 
on the contrary, it intensified — the hostile feel- 
ing of the loyal people of the North toward 
England, nor was there anything in the utter- 
ances or conduct of those who spoke for 
England calculated to produce a change. 
The vilification of the United States and her 
President and of all her leaders and soldiers in 
the magazines and newspapers went on with- 
out ceasing and without modification. From 
British ports and British shipyards armed ves- 
sels slipped away which, although nominally 
ships of the Confederate navy, pursued in 
reality a simple career of privateering closely 
akin to piracy. The only one of them which 
actually came into action was destroyed by 
the Kearsarge, and an English yacht rescued 
the Southern officers and the British crew of 
the sinking Alabama. This business of fur- 
nishing a Confederate navy from the ports 
and shipyards of a neutral country went on 
with the covert support of the British Cabi- 
net until the case ot the Laird rams was 
reached. Protests even then were in vain, 
and it was not until Mr. Adams wrote down 
the famous words, " It is superfluous in 
me to point out to your Lordship that 
this is war," that the rams were stopped 
and English ports ceased to send forth priva- 
teers. In the great life and death struggle 
in which the people of the United States 
were then engaged the loss of some mer- 
chant ships on the high seas was an injury 
so comparatively trifling in its effect upon 
the result that it was hardly perceptible ; but 
the course of England which permitted the 
destruction of merchant vessels in this way 
was, in the eyes of the American people, a 
crime of the first magnitude. The leaders 



of the English Cabinet were not friendly, 
although Lord Palmerston, fortunately for 
us, was more indifferent and less actively 
hostile than was generally supposed, and 
neither he nor Lord John Russell, who was 
much less friendly, was disposed to precipi- 
tate war. The one outspoken champion of 
the Confederacy was Gladstone ; but fate so 
willed it that in striving to harm the United 
States he rendered it a great and decisive 
service. It was in the autumn of 1862, a 
very dark hour in the fortunes of the United 
States. The Ministry were preparing to 
recognize the Confederacy. The Queen, 
since the death of Prince Albert, as Mr. 
Charles Francis Adams has recently shown, 
had ceased to interest herself in American 
affairs. A Cabinet meeting was called for 
October 23, and then the recognition of the 
Confederacy was to be given. On the 7th 
of October Mr. Gladstone, anticipating the 
action of the Cabinet, went to Newcastle and 
delivered the famous speech in which he 
declared that " Jefferson Davis had made a 
nation." Lord Palmerston saw his successor 
in Gladstone, but he had no intendon of 
letting him rule before his time. He resented 
the Newcastle speech ; he did not propose to 
have Mr. Gladstone force his hand, and a 
week later he sent Sir George Lewis down to 
Hereford to controvert and disavow the New- 
castle utterances. The Cabinet meeting on 
the 23d was postponed, but the accepted 
time had passed, and never returned. Mr. 
Gladstone's speech, however, did its work in 
the United States, still further embittering 
the already intense and deep-seated enmity 
toward England and her Government. We 
had friends, it is true — -some even in the Cab- 
inet, like Sir George Lewis— but the general 
attitude of the English Ministry was such 
that, while it inflamed the enmity of the 
North, it was far from gaining the friendship 
of the South, because, while the South was 
amused with sympathetic expressions and 
encouraged to hope for substantial support, 
it never received anything of real value, thus 
being left with an unpleasant sense of having 
been betrayed. A system more nicely calcu- 
lated to incur the hostility of both sides in 
the great quarrel could not have been im- 
agined, and it does not seem unjust to sug- 
gest that such a system did not imply a 
very high order of intelligence. Only very 
slowly and entirely outside the Government 
did it become apparent that the Union and 
freedom had any friends in England. The 



17 



first public man to declare for the North was 
Richard Cobden, and he was followed by 
John Bright, whose powerful and most elo- 
quent speech on the Roebuck resolution was 
one of the greatest services rendered by any 
man, not an American, to the cause of the 
Union. Lord Houghton, then Monckton 
Milnes, also spoke for us in the House of 
Commons. Mr. Forster was our friend, so 
were John Stuart Mill, Goldwin Smith, and 
Thomas Hughes ; and there were others, of 
course, like these men, whose support it was 
an honor to have. 

The workingmen of Lancashire, reduced 
to misery by the cotton famine, were none 
the less true in their sympathy for the cause 
which they believed to be that of human rights 
and human freedom. But these voice's, 
potent as they were, were lost in the general 
clamor which arose from the clubs at Lon- 
don, from the newspapers, and from the 
reviews. The desire to side actively with 
the South declined, of course, as the for- 
tunes of the Confederacy sank, but the con- 
temptuous abuse of the North went on with- 
out abatement. Even so late as the last year 
ot the war so clever a man as Charles 
Lever demonstrated, in " Blackwood's Maga- 
zine," to his own satisfaction the folly and 
absurdity of Sherman's great movement. 
The article appeared just in time to greet 
Sherman as he emerged triumphant at 
Savannah. 

Sherman's march to the sea, following 
jeers and predictions like those put forth by 
Lever, produced a profound impression in 
England, which then, at last, seemed to become 
dimly conscious that a great war had been 
fought out by great armies. The end of 
the war and the complete triumph of the 
Union cause soon followed. As in games, 
so in more serious things. Englishmen are 
excellent winners, but, as a rule, poor losers, 
apt to cry out, when they have lost, that there 
has been something unfair and to try to be- 
little and explain away their adversary's vic- 
tory. In this case, however, England showed 
herself a good loser, for the result was too 
serious to be treated with contempt or with 
charges of unfairness. Moreover, England 
found herself confronted not only by the suc- 
cess of the United States, and the consequent 
consolidation of the Union, but by a very 
unfortunate situation which she had herself 
created. She had managed to secure the 
bitter hostility of both sides. She had given 
sympathy to the South, but had done nothing 



practical for the cause of the Confederacy, 
and at the same time she had outraged the 
feelings of the Northern people and devel- 
oped among them a bitterness and dislike 
which, when they were flushed with victory, 
might easily have had most serious conse- 
quences. It is quite true that she had not 
behaved so badly toward the United States as 
France, which had stopped just short of war. 
When England, France, and Spain united to 
exact reparation from Mexico, England and 
Spain withdrew as soon as they discovered 
that France intended to establish a govern- 
ment of her own creation on Mexican soil. 
Not only was the French Government sym- 
pathetic with the South, but Napoleon was 
more than anxious to recognize the Confed- 
eracy, and took advantage of our Civil War 
to fit out the Mexican expedition and estab- 
lish Maximilian as Emperor. As soon as 
the war was over we forced France out of 
Mexico, and the unfortunate Maximilian, an 
amiable and brave man, but of less than 
mediocre capacity, was executed by his sub- 
jects and offered up as a sacrifice to his 
incautious reliance upon the French Emperor 
and to his own ignorance of the peril of 
infringing the Monroe Doctrine. 

Yet, despite all this, the people of the 
United States cared very little about what 
France had done, and felt bitterly all that the 
English had said. The attitude of the 
French Government during our Civil War, 
which there is no reason to suppose was the 
attitude of the French people, no doubt 
caused Americans generally to sympathize 
with Germany in the war of 1870, but ex- 
cept for that sympathy we regarded with 
great indifference the French treatment of 
the United States during the Civil War. Very 
different was the relation to England. As 
soon as the war was over the era of apology 
began on the part of England, finding its 
first expression in Tom Taylor's well-known 
verses upon the death of Lincoln. The 
acknowledgment of these mistakes, however, 
produced but slight impression in the United 
States, where there was a universal determi- 
nation to exact due reparation for the con- 
duct of England, and especially for the 
depredations of the Alabama and the other 
cruisers let loose from British shipyards to 
prey upon our commerce. Attempts were 
at once made to settle these differences, but 
the Johnson-Clarendon treaty was rejected 
by the Senate, and when Grant came to the 
Presidency there was a strong feeling, repre- 



18 



sented by Mr. Sumner, in favor of making 
no demands on England, but of obtaining our 
redress by taking possession of Canada. 
With a veteran army of a million men and a 
navy of over seven hundred vessels, includ- 
ing some seventy ironclads, the task would 
not have been a difficult one. President 
Grant and Mr. Fish, however, decided upon 
another course, and were really unwilling to 
adopt a policy which, however justifiable, 
might have carried the country into another 
war. The result was that England sent out 
a special commission to Washington to make 
a treaty. Mr. Gladstone, who was then 
Prime Minister, behaved with manliness and 
courage. He admitted frankly the great 
mistake he had made in his Newcastle 
speech, and bent all his energies to reaching 
a settlement with the United States which 
would satisfy Americans and so far as possi- 
ble heal the wounds inflicted by England's 
attitude and by English utterances during the 
war. In the first article of the treaty of 
1871, which followed, it is said : 

" Her Britannic Majesty has authorized her 
high commissioners and plenipotentiaries to 
express in a friendly spirit the regret felt by 
her Majesty's Government for the escape 
under any circumstances of the Alabama and 
other vessels from British ports and for the 
depredations committed by those vessels." 

It must have been a serious trial not only 
for a Ministry but for a proud and powerful 
nation thus formally and officially to apologize 
for its past conduct, and yet, unless England 
was ready for war and for the loss of Can- 
ada, no other method seemed possible. It is 
greatly to England's credit and to the credit 
of the Government of that day that they were 
willing to express their regret for having 
done wrong. 

The treaty established a court of arbitra- 
tion to consider and pass upon the claims. It 
also provided for referring the differences in 
regard to the line of our boundary through 
the Fuca Straits to the Emperor of Germany, 
who subsequently made an award wholly in 
favor of the United States. The treaty also 
dealt with many other questions, including 
fishery rights, the navigation of the St. 
Lawrence and of Lake Michigan, the use of 
canals and the conveyance of merchandise in 
bond through the United States. In due 
course the claims were taken before the 
Geneva tribunal. The arbitration came dan- 
gerously near shipwreck, owing to the projec- 
tion into it of the indirect claims, so called, 



which were urged in a powerful speech by 
Mr. Sumner in the Senate, but the tribunal 
wisely excluded them, and the case came to 
a decision, an award of $15,500,000 being 
made to the United States for the damages 
caused by the Alabama and her sister ships. 

So far as the official relations of the two 
countries were concerned the Treaty of Wash- 
ington restored them to the situation which 
had existed before the Civil War. Once 
again we were, officially speaking, on good 
and friendly terms with Great Britain, but 
the feeling left among the people of the 
United States by England's attitude remained 
unchanged, and the harsh and bitter things 
which had been said in England during 
our days of trial and suffering still rankled 
deeply. This was something which only the 
passage of time could modify, and the wounds 
which had been made took long to heal, 
although the healing process was facilitated 
by the fact that the Civil War had made the 
people of the United States profoundly indif- 
ferent to foreign criticism. There was, more- 
over, no clash between the countries until 
many years after the Treaty of Washington, 
and when the next difficulty arose it came not 
from any immediate difference between Eng- 
land and the United States, but grew out of 
an English invasion of the Monroe Doctrine 
in South America. 

For many years there had been a dis- 
pute between England and Venezuela as 
to the boundary between that country and 
the possessions of England in British Guiana. 
Venezuela, weak and distracted by revolu- 
tion, had sought more than once for arbitra- 
tion, which England would not grant. On 
the contrary, the British Government had 
steadily pushed its line forward and ex- 
tended its claims until it was found that it 
was gradually absorbing a large part of 
what had always been considered Venezuelan 
territory. Venezuela had broken off diplo- 
matic relations, but nothing had succeeded in 
checking the English advances. The offer 
of the good offices of the United States had 
been equally fruidess, and finally the matter 
reached a crisis, and Mr. Cleveland, on De- 
cember 17, 1895, sent in his famous Message. 
After reviewing the Venezuelan question and 
the efforts that we had made toward a peace- 
ful settlement, the President recommended 
that 1 n American commission be appointed 
to examine the question and report upon the 
matter. He said that when such report was 
made •• it would be the dutv of the United 



19 



States to resist by every means in its power 
as a willful aggression upon its rights and 
interests the appropriation by Great Britain 
of any lands or the exercise of governmental 
jurisdiction over any territory which after 
investigation we have determined of right 
belongs to Venezuela." The Message con- 
cluded with the following sentence : " I am, 
nevertheless, firm in my conviction that, while 
t is a grievous thing to contemplate the two 
great English-speaking peoples of the world 
as being otherwise than friendly competitors 
in the onward march of civilization and stren- 
uous and worthy rivals in all the arts of peace, 
there is no calamity which a great nation can 
invite which equals that which follows a supine 
submission to wrong and injustice and the 
consequent loss of national self-respect and 
honor, beneath which are shielded and de- 
fended a people's safety and greatness." The 
language employed by the President was vig- 
orous and determined. At the time it was 
thought rough. England was surprised, and 
operators in the stock market were greatly 
annoyed. The closing words of the Message, 
vhich was a very able one, do not seem quite 
so harsh to-day as they did at the time 
when they were read to Congress. President 
Cleveland, moreover, however much Wall 
Street might cry out, had the country with 
him, and no one to-day, I think, can question 
the absolute soundness of his position. 

With the possessions of any European 
Power in the Western Hemisphere we, of 
course, did not meddle, but it was the settled 
policy of the country that those possessions 
should not be extended or new ones created. 
The forcible seizure of American territory by 
a European Power would be, of course, an 
obvious violation of the Monroe Doctrine, 
which this country believes essential to its 
safety; but the gradual grasping of American 
territory on the basis of shadowy, undeter- 
mined, and constantly widening claims, dif- 
fered from forcible seizure only in degree. 
If the land in dispute belonged to Great 
Britain, we had nothing whatever to say, but 
so long as it was in controversy the United 
States had the right to demand that that con- 
troversy should be settled by a proper tri- 
bunal under whose decision the world should 
know just what belonged to England and 
what to Venezuela. President Cleveland's 
strong declaration surprised England, but it 
brought her to terms. She woke up to the 
fact that the day had long since passed when 
the United States could be trifled with on any 



American question, and the soundness of Mr. 
Cleveland's judgment was shown by the fact 
that within a year the question was referred 
to a tribunal which met in Paris and which 
consisted of two Americans, two English- 
men, and one Russian jurist. The Ameri- 
can judges were Chief Justice Fuller and Mr. 
Justice Brewer, of the Supreme Court. They 
went to Paris with the somewhat innocent 
idea that they were to hear the case and de- 
cide it on its merits, exactly as they decided 
a case in their own Supreme Court. They 
found, however, that the two English judges 
had no such conception of their functions, 
but were there as representatives of England, 
holding the positions of advocates instead of 
judges. The result was that the decision 
rested with the fifth man, Mr. Martens, and 
he, apparently under instructions not strictly 
judicial, was prepared to decide entirely in 
favor of England, although the English case 
for a large part of the claim was of the most 
shadowy character. It was very important, 
however, to England that the award should 
be signed by all the arbitrators, and that 
which was most essential to Venezuela was 
to preserve her control of the mouths of the 
Orinoco. The American arbitrators consented 
to sign the award if the mouths of the Orinoco 
were left to Venezuela, and this was done, all 
the rest of the disputed territory going to 
England. If the rest of the territory be- 
longed to England, the mouths of the Orinoco 
also should have been hers. If the mouths 
of the Orinoco belonged to Venezuela, 
England was not entitled to a large part 
of what she received. In other words, 
the judgment of the arbitral tribunal was 
a compromise and not a decision on the 
merits of the case, in which it followed the 
course of most arbitrations and disclosed 
the weakness of which arbitral tribunals 
have hitherto nearly always been guilty. 
This failing is that they do not decide a case 
on its merits, but make a diplomatic com- 
promise, giving something to each side. It 
is this tendency or practice of arbitral tribu- 
nals which has caused them to be distrusted, 
and especially in the United States, because, 
while the United States has no questions in 
Europe, Europe has many questions of inter- 
est in the Western Hemisphere, and the 
result has been on more occasions than one 
that the United States has been drawn into 
an arbitration where it could gain nothing and 
was certain to lose if any compromise was 
effected. In this particular instance, however. 



MAY 31 1912 



20 



the result which Mr. Cleveland desired and 
which he sought to reach by his Message was 
fully attained. The boundary was deter- 
mined, the process of gradual encroachment 
on a weak American state under cover of 
claims more or less artificial and advanced 
by a powerful European nation was stopped, 
and an end was put once and for all to the 
plan of securing new American possessions 
by the insidious method of starting and de- 
veloping claims and then refusing to have the 
claims settled and boundaries determined by 
any tribunal. Mr. Cleveland rendered a very 
great public service by his action and caused 
the Powers of Europe to understand and 
appreciate the force and meaning of the 
Monroe Doctrine as they had never done 
before. 

Three years after President Cleveland's 
Venezuelan Message the United States was 
at war with Spain. Admiral Dewey's fleet 
had captured Manila and the great European 
Powers hastened to send war-ships to the 
scene of action. Some of these vessels were 
more powerful than any which Admiral 
Dewey had in his fleet, and the German Ad- 
miral behaved in a way which came very near 
bringing on serious trouble between his 
country and the United States. Admiral 
Dewey's firmness put an end to the disagree- 
able attitude of the Germans, but he also 
received assurances of support from Captain 
Chichester, in command of the English ships, 
which were of great value. This almost open 
act of friendliness, which recalled the old days 
in China when Commodore Tatnall went to 
the aid of the English, declaring that " blood 
was thicker than water," was merely repre- 
sentative of the attitude of the English Gov- 
ernment. The sympathies of Europe were 
with Spain, but England stood by the United 
States, and this fact did more to wipe out the 
past and make the relations between the two 
countries what they should have been long 
before than all the years which had elapsed 
since the bitter days of the Civil War. 

England's attitude, moreover, toward the 
United States during the war with Spain was 
only a part of the general policy of the Gov- 
ernment then in control. When the Pan- 
ama Canal, the interest in which had been 
steadily growing, reached a point where the 
United States was determined that the Canal 
should be built, it was found that the Clayton- 
Bulvver Treaty was a stumbling-block to any 
movement on the part of the United States. 
The American feeling was so stronsf that 



Congress was only too ready to abrogate 
the treaty by its own action, but, the ques-^'lMA 
tion being brought to the attention of '^ 
Lord Salisbury, the English Government 
showed itself more than willing to join with 
the United States in superseding the Clayton- 
Bulwer Treaty by a new one under which 
the United States should have a free hand in 
dealing with the Canal. The first Hay- 
Pauncefote Treaty failed, owing chiefly to 
having incorporated in it a provision by which 
it was agreed that the Powers of Europe 
should be entitled to join in the neutralization 
of the Canal. This, on our part, was of 
course inviting the destruction of the Monroe 
Doctrine, and the Senate amended the treaty. 
England refused to accept the Senate amend- 
ments, but proceeded to make with us a 
second treaty which conformed to the changes 
proposed by the Senate, and this was ratified 
without opposition. 

The policy manifested by the attitude of 
England in regard to the Canal question, 
which had followed upon the end of the 
Spanish War, was closely followed, and was 
indeed enlarged, by Mr. Balfour when he 
succeeded Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister. 
President McKinley, in his desire to settle 
all possible outstanding questions with Great 
Britain — questions which related entirely to 
Canada — had brought about a meeting of an 
Anglo-American commission in Washington. 
It became evident that all questions could be 
easily arranged, with the exception of the x\las- 
kan boundary, and upon that the difference 
was so sharp that the commission adjourned 
without having reached any conclusion at all in 
any direction. All the other differences re- 
mained in abeyance, but the Alaskan question 
became constantly more perilous. Nations, 
like men, will fight about the possession of 
land when they will fight about nothing else, 
and the Alaskan question, which caused a 
great deal of feeling in the Northwest, was 
rapidly approaching the dangerous stage. A 
treaty to submit the boundary of Alaska to 
an international tribunal, consisting of three 
Americans and three representatives of Can- 
ada and Great Britain, was made and ratified 
in 1903. The English representatives were 
two distinguished Canadians and Lord Alver- 
stone, the Lord Chief Justice of England. 
The case was fully argued, and the decision 
was almost wholly in favor of the contention 
of the I'nited States, which was owing to the 
action of Lord Alverstone, who decided in 
the main against the Canadian claim. 



21 







Thus the one question which was pregnant 
h real danger was eliminated, and the 
Iher questions with Canada were rapidly 
settled in the succeeding years of President 
Roosevelt's Administration while Mr. Root 
was Secretary of State. One treaty settled 
the international boundary, another provided 
for the protection of the fisheries on the 
Lakes, another for the international water- 
ways, and, finally, the long-contested ques- 
tion of our rights in the Newfoundland fish- 
eries went to The Hague for determination 
under a treaty framed by Mr. Root. 

All these important agreements which 
made for the best relations between Great 
Britain and the United States grew out of 
the attitude of England at the time of the 
Spanish War, and were due to the policy of 
which Mr. Balfour in particular, and Lord 
Lansdowne, the Secretary of State for Foreign 
Affairs, were the chief exponents. In a 
speech at Manchester Mr. Balfour said : 

The time may come — nay, the time must 
come — when some statesman of authority, more 
fortunate even than President Monroe, will lay 
do,/n the doctrine that between English-speak- 
ing peoples war is impossible. 

To that noble sentiment Mr. Balfour and 



Lord Lansdowne strictly adhered, and to 
their action we owe the settlement of all 
these questions which have perplexed us with 
our northern neighbor, and, in consequence, 
the good relations which now exist between 
Great Britain and the United States, and 
which it is to be hoped will always continue. 
The policy might have been adopted in 1798 
as well as in 1898. but Mr. Balfour and Lord 
Lansdowne were the first English statesmen 
who saw that the true policy for England was 
to be friends with the United States, and that 
that friendship could be brought about by 
treating the United States not as had been 
the practice in the past but as one great 
nadon should always be treated by another. 
They came to us, it is true, in the hour 
of our success, but none the less they are 
entitled to a place in the memory of Ameri- 
cans with Burke and Fox and Chatham, with 
Cobden and with Bright, who did not forget 
the common language and the common aspi- 
rations for freedom in the days when the 
Americans were a little people struggling to 
exist, or in those still darker days when the 
United States was trying to preserve the 
unity of the great Nation which Washington 
had founded and which Lincoln was destined 
to save. 



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